KOGSYWhat it costsCoverage
What does one caregiver call-out cost?
Almost nobody itemises this, so there is no figure to quote you. It has four parts: the office time spent finding cover, any premium paid to the person who covers, the gross margin on hours that go unfilled, and the client relationship cost, which is real and which we are not going to pretend is calculable. The first three are arithmetic and are below.
Last updated 28 July 2026. No figure on this page is a sector average. The arithmetic is yours to run on your own numbers.
01 · Why
Why you probably do not know
Because the scramble is done by people you already pay a salary to. When a scheduler spends forty minutes ringing round to cover a shift, no invoice is generated, no timesheet changes, and no report anywhere says "forty minutes, cover." The cost is entirely absorbed into a line that reads the same whether it was a quiet Tuesday or a bad one.
That is also why it is easy to underestimate the total. One call-out feels like an interruption rather than an expense. Two hundred call-outs a year is a headcount question.
02 · The method
How to work it out for your agency
Time one week honestly. Every time a shift falls over, note how many minutes of office time it consumed, from the phone call to the confirmed replacement, including the calls that went nowhere.
office cost = minutes to cover ÷ 60 × loaded office hourly rate
cover premium = extra hourly cost of whoever covered × hours covered
unfilled cost = hours never covered × (bill rate − caregiver rate)
per call-out = office cost + cover premium + unfilled cost
annual = per call-out × call-outs per yearTwo things people leave out. The unsuccessful calls count, because the time was spent whether or not it worked. And if the cover came from somebody already at or near overtime, the premium is real money, not an accounting artefact.
Do not include the client relationship cost. You cannot price it and an invented number there would undermine the three you can defend.
03 · The figure
What a typical figure looks like
We do not have a distribution and we have not found a published one. The frequency varies enormously with your client mix, your shift lengths and how far your caregivers travel, so a sector average would be close to meaningless even if somebody had one.
What we would say is that the office cost per call-out is usually the part that surprises people, and it is the part that scales with volume rather than with severity.
04 · The limits
What this is not
This is not a measure of caregiver reliability and should not be used as one. Call-outs happen for reasons that have nothing to do with the person calling out, and an agency that treats this number as a performance metric will get worse data and a worse workforce.
05 · Next
Next
Once you have your per call-out figure, multiply it out for the year before you decide whether it matters. The annual number is the one that changes decisions.
What a short shift actually earns uses the same office rate, so the two are worth doing together.
Not sure this is your biggest one? Rank all eight against your own numbers — fourteen questions, no score, and it asks for nothing before showing you the result.